What should we hope to accomplish with the Lean methodology in healthcare organizations around the world? Taiichi Ohno, one of the creators of the Toyota Production System, wrote simply, “Start from need.”

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Far too many patients are harmed or killed due to preventable errors and hospital acquired infections. Again, this is a worldwide problem. There is a moral imperative to use Lean and other process improvement methodologies to reduce errors and harm. Better processes and systems, not asking employees to be more careful in their chaotic settings, are the key to improving patient safety.

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Lean, of course, is not just about setting targets. It's certainly not Lean to bribe employees with bonuses for having fewer injuries (as people might just stop reporting them) and it's especially not Lean to threaten people with punishment for not meeting safety goals.

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To improve employee safety, we all have to work together to improve the process.

Michael Balle on Lean and Six Sigma

Some highlights from the Balle article:

Lean and six sigma are profoundly irreconcilable because they stem from different values, and seek different ideals – no matter how similar some of the specific tools might look like.

Why is this?

The fact that both DMAIC and kaizen have the same roots in Deming's PDCA should not obscure their profoundly different aims and underlying values. DMAIC is about having a specialist fix a process problem and then get employees to apply the patch to get the business result. Kaizen is about fostering teamwork by taking on challenging improvement topics and solving the “buds of problems” to learn how to better manage processes day to day. Lean's specificity can be expressed as: 1) techniques to visualize OK versus not-OK in day-to-day operations, 2) in order to develop the entire organization's problem solving abilities, so that 3) process capability improves, as well as process innovation.

No matter how hard people try to create the “lean six sigma” blend, these two trains don't run on parallel tracks, and there isn't space for common ground. Actually, lean six sigma is six sigma with some elements of lean included, such as “waste elimination”, and faster project turnaround, but it remains clearly in the six sigma field of process fixing to obtain immediate business results.

He adds:

Six sigma's aim is to fix the process through greater compliance and lean's aim is to foster the kaizen spirit so people manage better their processes. These are two very different goals, and unfortunately hard to reconcile…

Balle says that Six Sigma is “relatively easy to implement” because it “fits well with the traditional Taylorist structure and attitude” of most managers, while Lean requires “the CEO's full commitment …”

I agree with his observation that “Lean Six Sigma” most often seems to be a heavy Six Sigma approach with a few Lean tools thrown in (as I've written about before: “Just Call It ‘5S Six Sigma' Then.”